Google's Data Centers, Noo-Politics and the Architecture of Hegemony
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Pearce, Thomas. “‘...So it really is a series of tubes.’ Google’s Data Centers, Noo-politics and the Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace ” Enquiry 10.1 (2013) 43-53. 13 volume 10|issue 1 “...So it really is a series of tubes.” Google’s Data Centers, Noo-politics and the Architecture of Hegemony in Cyberspace Thomas Pearce ABSTRACT “You walk through those doors and the world opens up to you. It’s a culture where information is free. A culture where the more you share and In recent years, the physical manifestation and infrastructure of the the more you ask the more you get.”1 informational age has increasingly drawn the attention both of the popular imagination and of architectural theorists. This paper focuses on an “This is the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where aspect mostly overlooked to date, namely on its artistic representation. the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become It provides a critical analysis of a series of data center photographs manifest.” published by Google in October 2012 under the name “Where the internet “As we leave the floor, I feel almost levitated by my peek inside Google’s lives”. The photographs are examined as carefully staged constructions inner sanctum.” 2 of a specific imagination of information technology that, transcending a purely aesthetical or corporate critique, has broad political, socio- “Google, I really love you. If you were a person I would leave my wife geographical and economical implications. A first analysis of their and marry you :)_” composition, digital manipulation and visual impact situates the images “no Google , no protection!” “Beautiful. Clean and organized but with Google you would expect within a recent photographic current of the so called “anthropogenic 3 Sublime”. The paper then zooms out to reframe the photographs as a nothing less.” continuation of the euphoric techno-utopian discourse that surrounded the “This is corporate propaganda that truly is a treat for the eyes”4 popular dissemination of the internet in the early nineteen-nineties. This discourse hailed the internet as an inherently moral and emancipatory “...So it really is a series of tubes.“5 vehicle that, because of the non-physical nature of cyberspace, would liberate its users from traditional hegemonic dispositifs based on (Some reactions to the data center images) techniques of physical coercion. Tracing the transition from bio-political (Foucault) to noo-political dispositifs (Lazarrato, Deleuze) and discussing 1. Transparency the inextricable connection between information technology, territorial On the 17th of October 2012, the world was in awe as Google went conflict and socio-geographic inequality, the article goes on to account transparent. On a website called “Where the internet lives”, Google for the demise of the dream of a “bodiless and moral internet”. Finally, released a series of over 80 images by photographer Connie Zhou, the data center images are re-read in more detail and discussed as offering the first ever glimpse into their top-secret data centers.6 part of the life-support system of a failed utopia - sustaining a popular yet reductionist understanding of the informational society and its key Up to that point, the Google data centers, accommodating the search players. engine’s ever growing number of servers, had been clouded in secrecy. An article, published earlier that year in Wired Magazine, described how, KEYWORDS: civilian-military-industrial complex, cybernetics, “paranoid about the competitors catching a glimpse of its gear”, Google cyberspace, data centers, hegemony, infrastructure, internet, noo- let the maintenance staff of an outsourced server farm work in complete politics, photography, sustainability darkness, only allowing the use of miner’s headlamps.7 In their own data centers, the company developed the most advanced customized server hardware, including highly efficient techniques for the demanding task of cooling its servers. Once disclosed, as critics like Greenpeace argued, these techniques could also help to sink the carbon footprint of other companies and thus enhance the sustainability of the entire sector. Facebook, one of the advocates of sharing know- ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 43 certain awe-inspiring quality. Presenting a highly aestheticizing gaze on the man-made environment, the images have a certain kinship to the work of photographers like Andreas Gursky, Edward Burtynsky or Bas Princen, who operate within a recent tradition of what could be called the “anthropogenic Sublime”. The Sublime was originally described by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger... Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror”.10 Figure 1: “Where the internet lives”, Photographer: Connie Zhou Figure 2: Bas Princen, Valley (China), 2008 how had made a point of publishing its data and allowing journalists and Whereas for Burke the Sublime was to be found in the vastness of nature architectural photographers into their own data centers.8 and the inevitability of the Divine, for the photographers in question the natural landscape of the romantic tradition - in its entirety cultivated and Then Google struck back, and its strategy was sophisticated: by not just exploited, known and broadcasted - has lost its aura of mystery and allowing a newspaper photographer to visit their facilities for a day but danger. Instead, the infrastructural, (post)industrial, and urban landscape instead hiring an architectural photographer, who spent multiple weeks has become the source of the Sublime. The dual emotion of danger and exploring and photographing9, Google proved that its data centers were attraction is now invoked by the “vertiginous dynamic of globalization”, a not only transparent, but above all, that they were beautiful. globalization that arguably has become our new “Divine”.11 2. The Anthropogenic Sublime Let us take as an example the series of photographs of stock exchanges Even when refraining from the quasi-religious enthusiasm of the quotes from around the world that Gursky produced in the late nineties. The opening this article, it is hard to deny that the photographs have a images show, from a bird’s eye perspective, vast and colorful seas of 44 ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 people, paper and screens. The depth of field stretches the entire image, completely mirrored around their central axes. Blogs and newspapers, showing every element in crisp detail. Gursky thereby refuses to establish which just previously had published the images and had shared in the hierarchy, bathing the image in an extensive sameness that does not excitement surrounding them, felt deceived and published illustrated seem to be confined by its frame but extends far beyond and deep into analyses of the manipulations.13 our own existence. It is the vastness and abstraction of man-made global capitalism gone out of control that is at once disturbing and aesthetic and Google was fast to react and in turn released some before-after images thus serves as the source of the Sublime. In these photographs, man and an interview with the photographer: himself becomes the “man-made” landscape. Figure 3: Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II, 1999 Interestingly, Gursky has often been compared to the painter Caspar “Beauty is something with a lot of symmetry. It’s more about the lines of David Friedrich, the master of the romantic Sublime. Gursky, in turn, everything I photograph [...] My goal was to help people see the beauty regards the distinction between the painter and the photographer as of the data centers. I had a certain artistic license to interpret the scene, outdated, seeing both as producers of “images” in a broad sense of but Google didn’t want me to hide or obscure anything - any changes I the word.12 Any Photoshop user will confirm how similar the process of made to a scene were aesthetic.”14 digital post-production - with its brushes, stamps and sponges - is to the process of painting. Like a painter, the photographer can manipulate that It is not my intention here to do the work of Photoshop forensics and which is depicted and thereby amplify (his understanding of) the truth. uncover that the images are manipulated. Nor do I want to engage in the discussion on whether it is correct to use artistic license to manipulate Soon after Google’s data center photographs were published, critical these images. Rather, I want to concentrate here on the question what observers started noticing and blogging about the fact that they too kind of image is constructed through manipulation and how techniques were heavily manipulated. In the most blatant cases, the images were of manipulation and composition contribute to this constructed reality. ENQUIRY / VOLUME 10 ISSUE 1 2013 45 Because, in spite of the artist’s statement, composition is not just a He goes on to state: matter of aesthetics. “The instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of 3. Soothing Symmetry us, all at once. No detachment or frame is possible.”15 Symmetric composition, for example, is much more than an aesthetic choice. The construction of many of the data center images is based on Following McLuhan’s argument, the data center images thus try to central perspective (achieved sometimes, but not exclusively, through achieve the impossible: to depict the “instantaneous world of electric mirroring). Describing an example of renaissance central perspective, informational media” (the “internet” didn’t exist at the time of writing) Marshall McLuhan dramatically states: as a framed, thus controlled and externalized central perspective. The human, the viewer, is placed outside of the framed image. In the few Figure 5: Fransesco di Giorgio, Ideal City, 1477 cases where a human appears in the data center images, he is neatly arranged to coincide with the central perspective’s vanishing point.